(Image credit: boheme.globaldiningca.com)
8400 Santa Monica Blvd. (at Kings Rd.), (323) 848-2360 or http://boheme.globaldiningca.com
You're killing us, La Boheme. You really are. You know us: we're always looking for a new restaurant to love and adore and have babies with and tell all our friends about. In general we're all about food, but we've also been known to swoon over superficial decor. (Yes, we went to Geisha House. And we even went back.) Your sexy lighting and Cicada-esque bi-level layout had us brimming with excitement the moment we walked in, but when we sat down and ordered drinks -- and they came up from the bar on a little mechanical elevator -- our draws dropped in the kind of un-ironic awe we didn't think was possible in the post-Twitter age.
Once we got over the incomparable coolness of dumbwaitered beverages, the food didn't disappoint either. Nice to see tofu as an actual entree, not a weird fringe-y "option," and it was prepared simply but sharply. Desserts were top-notch as well... pudding may be hard to screw up, but it's also hard to really nail, and your pastry chef deserves props for pulling off the latter.
So with all those components of awesomeness in place, the stage was pretty much set for an unmitigated success of an evening.
But then. We. WAITED.
Waited for a server to come and offer us drinks. Waited for those drinks to reach our table after arriving on the awesome hand-crank elevator thingy (barely ten feet away! I considered grabbing them myself but figured it'd be bad form). Waited for our salads to be replaced by entrees. And finally, at the end of the night (by which point Alexis had been up for roughly 92 hours), waited for-freaking-EVER for our credit card to be dashed away to the register in the magical land of getting-to-go-home-ness.
Were you understaffed? Is that it? Because, as rockin' as your decor may be, you were never more than half-full (and this was a Saturday night around 9:30 P.M., mind you). If you want more customers, you may just have to bite the bullet and hire enough people to serve them. Either that, or provide us with a comfy place to nap while we're waiting to eat and drink things and then pay for them.
(Another option: let us play with the dumbwaiter. It's the greatest thing since prompt service.)
1 comments:
Yeah, you guys overdid it on the French-style service. I felt a dine-and-ditch would've been completely justified with how loooooooong-g-g we waited for our check. The only thing that kept me from carrying it out is that I had just spent 12 hours at work caring for a patient who happened to be my friend dying of an atrocious cancer, thus greatly enhancing my appreciation of life and its idiosyncrasies, and consequently my good will toward humankind. However, my meal with you acted as a fair antidote to that sentiment. maybe you guys should take the whole operation in a different direction. "La Boheme: more potent than widely metastatic malignancy." It takes a long time to say, but maybe it'll buy you a little time on your customers noticing that the food still...isn't...there.
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